


Recursive Memory

by anybody_out_there



Category: Original Work
Genre: Depression, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, dangerously vague, don’t tell your young child you want to die pls, manic depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:26:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22381042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anybody_out_there/pseuds/anybody_out_there
Summary: Like a recurring dream. Fuzzy around the edges, maybe. But it happens when you’re awake—again and again—you swear you were awake you weren’t dreaming, you can’t get hurt in dreams, you’d wake up.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Recursive Memory

Bundled up in the bed in our basement. When Mom is out of bed, we paint fairy houses and bake bread and paint with our fingers and she yells when I do it wrong. Mom takes care of me. She gives me soup when I am sick and I get to live in her house. Sometimes the fire escape by my window picks at me, pokes the backs of my eyeballs from its corner in my brain.

I would never survive with just one bag of things and I would have to leave a lot behind. My bed with the quilt wouldn’t fit through the window and down two stories. Stuffed Dog wouldn’t fit in my backpack, and it would take a long time to fill a new Stuffed Dog’s fur with salty kisses. I let the fire escape niggle and pick and scratch all it wants.

I think Mom has a fire escape by her window, too. I think it pokes her in the eyes, too--pokes and pokes until she sinks down through the floorboards and into the bed in the basement.

I don’t like that bed. It makes my skin twist over my bones and punches a hot hole in my stomach. But I think I have a lot in common with the reluctant little wooden duck that I used to pull around on a string: I clatter down the stairs and fall across the cold unfinished basement floor. I don’t look at the rafters on the ceiling because they look like the inside of a ribcage and I don’t want to know that I am inside of a ribcage. Mom cries and I think about the cricket paper we have hidden behind the bed, stickier than packing tape. Sticky sticky sticky. 

I tried to show Mom that she could be content, stuck to that cricket-paper house as we both were. I didn’t let on that my little insect legs were glued down, too--and she would say, “Forgive Me,” and she would say, “you must not be burdened by Me.” But she was the whole atmosphere--an atmosphere and a half--weighting down the empty cracks and corners in that big, cluttered house. I never told her that she was squeezing me out the window and down the fire escape that itched inside my skull. Never told her she was squishing my cricket guts into the ground. 

Sticky sticky sticky.


End file.
